- Solar radiation modification (SRM) is a form of geoengineering that aims to cool off the Earth by reflecting sunlight back into space
- The controversial strategy comes with significant risks, but that didn’t stop The White House from moving forward with a research plan for “solar and other rapid climate interventions”
- The congressionally mandated research plan is focused on atmospheric-based approaches, such as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) and marine cloud brightening (MCB)
- SRM can have unintended consequences, including lower average precipitation, loss of biodiversity and impacts to food production, along with heightening geopolitical tensions
- There’s also a risk that climate modification technologies could be weaponized against the global population by controlling rainfall and drought
Solar radiation modification (SRM) is a form of geoengineering that aims to cool off the Earth by reflecting sunlight back into space.1 The controversial strategy comes with significant risks, but that didn’t stop the White House from moving forward with a research plan for “solar and other rapid climate interventions.”2
The congressionally mandated research plan is focused on atmospheric-based approaches, such as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) and marine cloud brightening (MCB), as opposed to space-based approaches, which include mirrors in space, or white roofs and other local-scale measures to increase surface reflectance.3
The research “would help to prepare the United States for possible deployment of SRM by other public and private actors,” the report notes,4 suggesting the government is seriously considering use of this extremely risky technology — if it hasn’t already decided to move forward.
What Is Stratospheric Aerosol Injection?
SAI involves injecting reflective aerosol particles into the stratosphere, where they reflect sunlight away from the Earth.5 Volcanic eruptions are natural versions of SAI, but technological constraints surround man-made SAI, as “dispersing aerosols in sufficiently high altitudes is challenging,” according to a Climate Analytics report.6 The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) explained:7
“In effect, SAI simulates what happens during large volcanic eruptions, when volcanoes emit small particles into the upper atmosphere (called the stratosphere). These particles reflect sunlight and lead to cooling for as long as they remain in the stratosphere, which may be up to a few years after injection.
By injecting sulfate or other aerosol particles into the stratosphere, SAI would mimic the cooling effect of a large volcanic eruption’s effect of lower global temperatures. If ever deployed, SAI would have global impacts, reducing temperatures and altering precipitation patterns across the planet.”
By reflecting more solar radiation back into space, the aerosols lower global temperatures but also have a serious “side effect” — they lower average precipitation. As a result, additional geoengineering techniques — such as thinning out cirrus clouds in the upper atmosphere — would be necessary to counteract the decrease in precipitation.8 The White House report also highlighted potential issues with SAI, noting:9
“SAI approaches could worsen soil acidity, with impacts to food production, compared to warming at Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5) levels without SAI in some regions due to acidic deposition (e.g., the Pacific Northwest, southern Greenland, the Himalayas, and polar regions).
The impacts of sunlight scattering could have negative effects on crop growth that harm nutrition and negate the benefits of limiting temperature increases using SAI. SRM would not address ocean acidification or its implications for ocean ecosystems.”
Other problems include the potential that SAI could result in increased exposure to particulate matter from the injected aerosols and “changes in radiative forcing,” which could offset any potential health benefits from SAI, such as reduced ozone formation. There’s also concern that SAI could increase wildfires and smoke exposures in some areas, as well as increase health impacts due to waterborne disease in others.10
What Is Marine Cloud Brightening?
MCB involves spraying salt or other chemicals into marine clouds in order to increase their reflectiveness.11 “Ship tracks over the ocean demonstrate the mechanism underpinning MCB,” according to the White House report.12 UCS explained, “MCB would involve spraying sea salt into low-lying marine clouds to enhance their brightness and reflectivity in order to increase regional-scale cooling.”13
Little research into MCB has been conducted, but field trials have already begun in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Using a seawater sprayer attached to a barge, seawater is sprayed into the air, creating sea salt crystals. “These crystals float into the sky to form a fog and bolster the existing clouds’ reflectivity,” according to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation.14
The “brightened” clouds may also stay above the reef longer than ordinary clouds, reflecting even more sunlight.15 The problem, however, is that this untested strategy could have unintended consequences.
“Potential negative effects could include influencing local weather patterns, potentially mildly suppressing rainfall over the reef and adjacent land,” the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program explained.16 David Keith, Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics with Harvard University, added that several “key risks” exist for marine cloud brightening, which is why his research team does not focus on it:17
“Even if marine cloud brightening could work, it could affect large scale climate and weather patterns if it were used on a large enough scale, say to achieve a level of “radiative forcing” that would be big enough to offset some of the greatest impacts of climate change.
(This is because marine cloud brightening could only be implemented in limited areas, where the right kinds of clouds exist, which is perhaps only 10 percent of the planet’s surface.) There are several key risks that need to be better understood.”
Increasing Geopolitical Tensions
Adding to the controversy, the use of SRM carries “significant geopolitical risks,” the White House report noted.18 An example of this occurred in 2023, when a startup team — Make Sunsets — said it had launched weather balloons containing helium and sulfur dioxide (SO2) into Mexican skies in order to alter the stratosphere.19
The company was selling “cooling credits” via its website for $10, in exchange for releasing 1 gram of SO2. The Mexican government fought back, however, announcing plans to “prohibit and, where appropriate, stop experimentation practices with solar geoengineering,” causing the team to suspend its operations.20 However, Make Sunsets is still reportedly planning to conduct further weather modification experiments in the U.S.
But the fact remains, if and when SRM becomes widely used, it will have global effects that transcend borders. Supercomputers have run models to predict how solar radiation management may affect different parts of the Earth, not only in terms of temperature but also rainfall and snowfall. Govindasamy Bala, from the Indian Institute of Science and author of a U.N. climate report, said “the science is there,”21 but it’s far from an exact one.
“I think the next big question is,” Bala told Reuters, “do you want to do it? … That involves uncertainty, moral issues, ethical issues and governance.” As Reuters reported, “That’s because every region would be affected differently. While some regions could gain in an artificially cooler world, others could suffer by, for example, no longer having conditions to grow crops.”22 Paulo Artaxo, environmental physicist at University of Sao Paulo and another report author, added:23
“Basically the message is more or less the same as (the previous report): The science is not mature enough. The side effects of any of the known geoengineering techniques can be very significant … Society has to consider if these side effects are too big to try any strategy.”
Will Biodiversity Suffer?
Among the risks outlined by the White House were those related to biodiversity. Again, it’s impossible to know what ramifications alterations to the stratosphere, clouds and sunlight reaching the Earth could have.
“SRM would likely also affect ecosystem functioning like net primary productivity and more integrative aspects of ecosystems like biodiversity, for example, because SRM may increase the proportion of diffuse rather than direct incoming solar radiation,” the White House noted,24 adding:25
“Implementing SRM is expected to limit the risks to biodiversity associated with higher temperatures but is also expected to affect the characteristics of solar radiation and potentially cloud cover (associated with changing precipitation patterns) without impacting higher CO2 levels.
These changes could have significant effects on vegetation and ecosystem health broadly, leading to unknown impacts to biodiversity, particularly when combined with other anthropogenic stressors (deforestation, urbanization, chemical use, etc.).”
What’s more, if geoengineering were started and then abruptly stopped, it would “significantly increase the threats to biodiversity from climate change,” according to researchers in Nature Ecology & Evolution.26
This means geoengineering could cause significant damage. In a news release from Springer Nature, it’s explained that, once started geoengineering is too dangerous to stop — but given the politicized nature of the technology, such rapid starts and stops are likely:27
“Abrupt termination causes changes in local climates that are 2-4 times more rapid than those caused by climate change itself … in many cases, rapid geoengineering threatens ecosystems by forcing species to move in one direction to maintain similar temperature conditions and a different direction for similar precipitation conditions.
Biodiversity-rich areas, such as tropical oceans and the Amazon basin, are particularly likely to be affected negatively. These results indicate that geoengineering, and, in particular, its rapid termination, could cause irreversible loss of biodiversity.”
Could Geoengineering Backfire, Lead to Agricultural Control?
There are other concerns about geoengineering’s nefarious side, particularly since Bill Gates remains heavily invested in climate modification technologies that not only will destabilize the Earth’s climate systems more, but also can be weaponized against the global population by controlling rainfall and drought. In a previous interview I conducted with Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., she explained:28
“The company that collects patents on gene-edited organisms, both in health and agriculture, is Editas, founded by a main financial investor for the Gates Foundation. Gates is also a big investor in Editas.
So, here’s a company called Editas to edit the world as if it is a Word program. The two scientists who got the Nobel Prize this year have both been funded in their research by Gates. My mind went back to how Rockefeller financed the research, got the Nobel Prize, and then made the money.
So, you finance the research. Then you finance the public institutions, whether they be national or international. You invest and force them down the path where they can only use what is your patented intellectual property. And, as he has said in an interview, his smartest investment was vaccines, because it is a 1-to-20 return. Put $1 in and make $20. How many billions of dollars have been put in? You can imagine how many trillions will be made.
At the end of it, where does food come from? It comes from seed. He wants to control it. It comes from land. He’s controlling that. He’s became the biggest farmland owner [in the U.S.]. But you need weather [control]. You need a stable climate.
So, what could be a weapon of control of agriculture? Weather modification. He calls it geoengineering. This is engineering of the climate. Again, making it look like he’s going to solve global warming by creating global cooling.”
You can follow the rapid expansion of geoengineering research and experimentation via an interactive online geoengineering map created by ETC Group and the Heinrich Boell Foundation. More than 1,700 such projects have already been identified.29
- 1, 7, 13 Union of Concerned Scientists October 29, 2020
- 2, 3 The White House, Congressionally Mandated Research Plan and an Initial Research Governance Framework Related to […], June 2023, About This Report
- 4 The White House, Congressionally Mandated Research Plan and an Initial Research Governance Framework Related to […], June 2023, Executive Summary
- 5, 11 ODI October 21, 2022
- 6 Climate Analytics March 2023
- 8, 21, 22, 23 Reuters August 10, 2021
- 9 The White House, Congressionally Mandated Research Plan and an Initial Research Governance Framework Related to […], June 2023, Page 32
- 10 The White House, Congressionally Mandated Research Plan and an Initial Research Governance Framework Related to […], June 2023, Page 30
- 12 The White House, Congressionally Mandated Research Plan and an Initial Research Governance Framework Related to […], June 2023, Page 13
- 14 Great Barrier Reef Foundation February 21, 2023
- 15, 16 Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program
- 17 Harvard University, David Keith’s Research Group, Marine Cloud Brightening
- 18 The White House, Congressionally Mandated Research Plan and an Initial Research Governance Framework Related to […], June 2023, Page 7
- 19, 20 Time January 19, 2023
- 24 The White House, Congressionally Mandated Research Plan and an Initial Research Governance Framework Related to […], June 2023, Page 11
- 25 The White House, Congressionally Mandated Research Plan and an Initial Research Governance Framework Related to […], June 2023, Page 33
- 26 Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 2, pages 475–482 (2018)
- 27 Internet Archive, Wayback Machine, Scimex January 23, 2018
- 28 Mercola Transcript Vandana Shiva
- 29 Geoengineering Map
Article cross-posted from Dr. Mercola’s site.
Five Things New “Preppers” Forget When Getting Ready for Bad Times Ahead
The preparedness community is growing faster than it has in decades. Even during peak times such as Y2K, the economic downturn of 2008, and Covid, the vast majority of Americans made sure they had plenty of toilet paper but didn’t really stockpile anything else.
Things have changed. There’s a growing anxiety in this presidential election year that has prompted more Americans to get prepared for crazy events in the future. Some of it is being driven by fearmongers, but there are valid concerns with the economy, food supply, pharmaceuticals, the energy grid, and mass rioting that have pushed average Americans into “prepper” mode.
There are degrees of preparedness. One does not have to be a full-blown “doomsday prepper” living off-grid in a secure Montana bunker in order to be ahead of the curve. In many ways, preparedness isn’t about being able to perfectly handle every conceivable situation. It’s about being less dependent on government for as long as possible. Those who have proper “preps” will not be waiting for FEMA to distribute emergency supplies to the desperate masses.
Below are five things people new to preparedness (and sometimes even those with experience) often forget as they get ready. All five are common sense notions that do not rely on doomsday in order to be useful. It may be nice to own a tank during the apocalypse but there’s not much you can do with it until things get really crazy. The recommendations below can have places in the lives of average Americans whether doomsday comes or not.
Note: The information provided by this publication or any related communications is for informational purposes only and should not be considered as financial advice. We do not provide personalized investment, financial, or legal advice.
Secured Wealth
Whether in the bank or held in a retirement account, most Americans feel that their life’s savings is relatively secure. At least they did until the last couple of years when de-banking, geopolitical turmoil, and the threat of Central Bank Digital Currencies reared their ugly heads.
It behooves Americans to diversify their holdings. If there’s a triggering event or series of events that cripple the financial systems or devalue the U.S. Dollar, wealth can evaporate quickly. To hedge against potential turmoil, many Americans are looking in two directions: Crypto and physical precious metals.
There are huge advantages to cryptocurrencies, but there are also inherent risks because “virtual” money can become challenging to spend. Add in the push by central banks and governments to regulate or even replace cryptocurrencies with their own versions they control and the risks amplify. There’s nothing wrong with cryptocurrencies today but things can change rapidly.
As for physical precious metals, many Americans pay cash to keep plenty on hand in their safe. Rolling over or transferring retirement accounts into self-directed IRAs is also a popular option, but there are caveats. It can often take weeks or even months to get the gold and silver shipped if the owner chooses to close their account. This is why Genesis Gold Group stands out. Their relationship with the depositories allows for rapid closure and shipping, often in less than 10 days from the time the account holder makes their move. This can come in handy if things appear to be heading south.
Lots of Potable Water
One of the biggest shocks that hit new preppers is understanding how much potable water they need in order to survive. Experts claim one gallon of water per person per day is necessary. Even the most conservative estimates put it at over half-a-gallon. That means that for a family of four, they’ll need around 120 gallons of water to survive for a month if the taps turn off and the stores empty out.
Being near a fresh water source, whether it’s a river, lake, or well, is a best practice among experienced preppers. It’s necessary to have a water filter as well, even if the taps are still working. Many refuse to drink tap water even when there is no emergency. Berkey was our previous favorite but they’re under attack from regulators so the Alexapure systems are solid replacements.
For those in the city or away from fresh water sources, storage is the best option. This can be challenging because proper water storage containers take up a lot of room and are difficult to move if the need arises. For “bug in” situations, having a larger container that stores hundreds or even thousands of gallons is better than stacking 1-5 gallon containers. Unfortunately, they won’t be easily transportable and they can cost a lot to install.
Water is critical. If chaos erupts and water infrastructure is compromised, having a large backup supply can be lifesaving.
Pharmaceuticals and Medical Supplies
There are multiple threats specific to the medical supply chain. With Chinese and Indian imports accounting for over 90% of pharmaceutical ingredients in the United States, deteriorating relations could make it impossible to get the medicines and antibiotics many of us need.
Stocking up many prescription medications can be hard. Doctors generally do not like to prescribe large batches of drugs even if they are shelf-stable for extended periods of time. It is a best practice to ask your doctor if they can prescribe a larger amount. Today, some are sympathetic to concerns about pharmacies running out or becoming inaccessible. Tell them your concerns. It’s worth a shot. The worst they can do is say no.
If your doctor is unwilling to help you stock up on medicines, then Jase Medical is a good alternative. Through telehealth, they can prescribe daily meds or antibiotics that are shipped to your door. As proponents of medical freedom, they empathize with those who want to have enough medical supplies on hand in case things go wrong.
Energy Sources
The vast majority of Americans are locked into the grid. This has proven to be a massive liability when the grid goes down. Unfortunately, there are no inexpensive remedies.
Those living off-grid had to either spend a lot of money or effort (or both) to get their alternative energy sources like solar set up. For those who do not want to go so far, it’s still a best practice to have backup power sources. Diesel generators and portable solar panels are the two most popular, and while they’re not inexpensive they are not out of reach of most Americans who are concerned about being without power for extended periods of time.
Natural gas is another necessity for many, but that’s far more challenging to replace. Having alternatives for heating and cooking that can be powered if gas and electric grids go down is important. Have a backup for items that require power such as manual can openers. If you’re stuck eating canned foods for a while and all you have is an electric opener, you’ll have problems.
Don’t Forget the Protein
When most think about “prepping,” they think about their food supply. More Americans are turning to gardening and homesteading as ways to produce their own food. Others are working with local farmers and ranchers to purchase directly from the sources. This is a good idea whether doomsday comes or not, but it’s particularly important if the food supply chain is broken.
Most grocery stores have about one to two weeks worth of food, as do most American households. Grocers rely heavily on truckers to receive their ongoing shipments. In a crisis, the current process can fail. It behooves Americans for multiple reasons to localize their food purchases as much as possible.
Long-term storage is another popular option. Canned foods, MREs, and freeze dried meals are selling out quickly even as prices rise. But one component that is conspicuously absent in shelf-stable food is high-quality protein. Most survival food companies offer low quality “protein buckets” or cans of meat, but they are often barely edible.
Prepper All-Naturals offers premium cuts of steak that have been cooked sous vide and freeze dried to give them a 25-year shelf life. They offer Ribeye, NY Strip, and Tenderloin among others.
Having buckets of beans and rice is a good start, but keeping a solid supply of high-quality protein isn’t just healthier. It can help a family maintain normalcy through crises.
Prepare Without Fear
With all the challenges we face as Americans today, it can be emotionally draining. Citizens are scared and there’s nothing irrational about their concerns. Being prepared and making lifestyle changes to secure necessities can go a long way toward overcoming the fears that plague us. We should hope and pray for the best but prepare for the worst. And if the worst does come, then knowing we did what we could to be ready for it will help us face those challenges with confidence.
